10 Romance Covers With Zero Abs

For one reason or another, I’ve recently noticed an unusually high number of people in my social media and in-person worlds complaining about the prevalence of “abs” on romance covers. You know the sort of boring, self-congratulatory comments. It’s stuff like, “Ugh, I can’t take these books seriously because of all the abs!” and “Oh, abs are nice, but wouldn’t a real story be even nicer?” or “Well, I’ve already hit my ‘real’ book quotient, so I might as well have abs to admire since I’m only going to be reading trash anyway!”

Setting aside the fact that there’s an actual cliché about not judging books by their covers, the idea that an exceptionally well-sculpted human body on the outside of a book would disallow an exceptionally well-crafted human story on the inside is bizarre and at least a little lazy.

But romance is multi-faceted, and if people need romance covers that are ab-free (maybe they have a religious thing or a medical condition or whatever), then so be it. Here are some creative, unique—and ab-free!—covers that also happen to adorn some great romance stories.

The only body parts this cover has on it are heads. And I genuinely love this cover, but you might need to think about who you are as a person if you’re cool with disembodied heads but not people with midsections.

Just out of general curiosity, I wouldn’t mind seeing the versions of Reid’s Winston Brothers series cross-stitch covers that include abs, but they’re also awfully great as they are, and it seems a little unfair to ask her to do more.

I leave you with this note of caution, everyone: this is what can happen if you have no abs. Put less dramatically, a lack of abs is not a in anyway an indicator that a book is of high quality. At all. So maybe don’t judge a book by the abs on its cover.

A woman checked out a book called How to Win a Local Election. And she did. Listen to Annotated on Apple Podcasts or Google Play to hear her story.